'We are all on drugs.'

Before people throw their arms up about the title of this blog, it is just a song title by Weezer. I’m not implying that we are all crazed heroin addicts, I just thought it fitting as this blog is about alcohol which is a legal DRUG. A drug that the majority of the world uses and sometimes abuses… So we, well most of us drink/drank… therefore we are all on drugs. Silly? Possibly. Clever… questionable. Either way, here we go.

Addiction: "an urge to do something that is HARD to control or stop. May Hurt or kill you."

I thought if I am going to go into talking about alcohol and abuse thereof, I thought it would be interesting if I put things in perspective. Speaking about the effects of alcohol on the brain and body, alcohol as a drug and a suppressant. I will also have a look at Alcoholics anonymous checklist, purely for interest sake. This blog will be mainly research based, but I hope you all find it interesting, as it will relate to the following blogs.

Why do we drink? Makes us happy, confident, feel superior, excited… how bloody marvellous. This is obviously healthy drinking or I would say acceptable drinking. On the other hand we wake up hating ourselves after a big night because we just feel like death… depressed and possibly paranoid about what happened when we were drunk.

Alcohol is the simplest psychoactive chemical that produces highly complex effects on the brain and body. What alcohol does is change the neurons’ membrane, it effects the gamma-amino butyric acid or GABA (regulates excitability and muscle tone) system which is involved in producing the quieting of the brain and has the power to temporarily reduce worry and tension. It is one of the brains main neurotransmitters that are involved in inhibition of stimulation. The system blocks anxiety and panic.

The effects of alcohol vary depending on amount consumed (obviously), and may be reversed with chronic alcohol use. It affects the dopamine (movement and emotion), nor epinephrine (attention and response) and serotonin (regulates mood and sleep) neurotransmitter systems in the brain. Because it is so rapidly metabolized in the body, there are withdrawal effects, which are the opposite of the initial intoxication. In other words when you start drinking, after a few glasses of wine you may feel a little dopey and lethargic, you feel happy, relaxed and maybe excited. Although alcohol has a similar effect on the brain as the GABA system, reducing anxiety the alcohol withdrawal is the opposite, and this withdrawal cause things such as epileptic seizures, paranoia, agitation and… insomnia.

I think most of us have experienced this. When you go to a music festival, have a fairly large weekend or super huge night, the following night you have trouble sleeping. So basically your body is in an alcohol withdrawal… Boom, ‘DEMONS’ explained.

Alcohol is a DRUG that causes depression, and allows for us to feel relaxed and let go of our inhibitions. The first thing alcohol affects is higher functions of the brain. These would be managing self-observation and self-criticism. Drinkers feel relaxed and free and often say and do things that later they find embarrassing. People sometimes release anger after small doses of alcohol and this is obviously magnified as more alcohol is consumed. When alcohol produces a change in mood and behaviours including anger and irritability, this is a sign of alcohol abuse. It is one of the safest and the most harm-producing intoxicant.

We all know effects of alcohol, passing out or blacking out vomiting and not remembering anything. But it also leads to liver damage, internal bleeding and may lead to brain damage. Alcohol if consumed in really large doses can cause death that is why it is actually good to vomit if you have drunken too much, or to force someone to vomit because you can actually save a life. This is obviously in severe cases where a person has a large amount of alcohol in their system, alcohol overdose.

Alcohol depresses the brain and slows down its ability to control the body and mind. This is why it is potentially dangerous, we all know this… UDI’s, Losers, memory loss, those regretted smooches you know the drill. It acts as a sedative and slows down co-ordination, reflexes, movement and speech. (I’m sure a couple of us have tried to throw thing or two to friends and they either miss it completely or don’t even realize something is coming towards them until the box of cigarettes or whatever has hit them square in the face.) Drinking alcohol in abundance may slow down the breathing and heart rate to such a level that the heart may potentially stop altogether.

This is purely for interest but here is the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 questions checklist:

1. Have you ever decided to stop drinking for a week or so, but only lasted for a couple of days?
2. Do you wish people would mind their own business about your drinking- stop telling you what to do?

3. Have you ever switched from one kind of drink to another in the hope that this would keep you from getting drunk?

4. Have you had to have an eye-opener upon wakening during the past year? A drink to get you going, stop the shakes…

5. Do you envy people who can drink without getting into trouble?

6. Have you had problems connected with drinking during the past year? Be honest.

7. Has your drinking caused trouble at home?

8. Do you ever try to get "extra" drinks at a party because you do not get enough? (pre-drinking, double parking)

9. Do you tell yourself you can stop drinking any time you want to, even though you keep getting drunk when you don’t mean to? (when you start drinking, you cant stop)                    10. Have you missed days of work or school because of drinking? (called
          in sick due to a hang-over)
        
         11. Do you have "blackouts"? memory loss.
        
         12. Have you ever felt that your life would be better if you didn’t drink?

If you answered yes to 4 or more questions you probably have a problem with alcohol. This is according to AA. There are more articles where people have said, "I’m not an alcoholic, I’m a student." Whatever you think, each to their own of course, but I just thought this was quite interesting.

I don’t want to harp on too much more about alcohol because I go off on a tangent, but if there is an interest from readers I will do more research on it, but here are a couple of facts about alcohol to round up:

1.) Coffee, showers, fresh air, does not sober a person up. Time does, you need to wait for the alcohol to leave your system for you to sober up.

2.) There are no ‘different alcohols’ all drinks contain ethanol or ethyl alcohol which is our drinking alcohol. People sometimes say the type of alcohol affects your mood. All drinks contain the same alcohol so it’s your mind that affects your mood chaps. And the more drinks you have the more readily the emotions come out.

3.) Men process alcohol more rapidly than women.

4.) The level of alcohol in your blood rises quicker when you drink spirits as oppose to beer. So if you drink spirits before beer you are likely to feel the effects sooner and possibly drink less. If you drink beer before spirits you may feel little effect on the body that may encourage you to order shots or harder drinks to feel an effect.

5.) It is not a ‘different’ alcohol that causes different hangovers. "I had a gin hangover." It is the compounds in the drinks called congeners (impurities produced during fermentation, also responsible for taste, aroma and colour of drinks) these alter your hangover in conjunction with dehydration caused by the alcohol. Clear drinks; white wine, gin, vodka contain less congeners than dark drinks; red wine, brandy, whiskey and rum. The more congeners consumed the worse the hangover will be. Combining these congeners/impurities will result in a more severe hangover.

6.) Drinking different drinks, mixing drinks gets you drunk. This is not the case. All drinks contain the same alcohol as explained above. It is drinking a large amount of alcohol in a short period of time. Everyone says cocktails get you drunk because of the mixture of alcohol, wrong, it is because you may be drinking about 4 units of alcohol in half an hour as oppose to 1 unit in one hour, which is considered, ‘normal’ drinking. The liver can only process one standard drink an hour, glass of wine, one beer, if you drink over this, such as the cocktail, it remains in the blood stream and body tissues until the liver can process the excess alcohol. Hence why we stay drunk for a while even after we have stopped drinking.

7.) Alcohol is addictive

8.) And lastly… Alcoholism is hereditary.

From my own experience I can say that on more than one occasion, in fact too many occasions, I have been so drunk that the level of alcohol in my body was a step away from me going into a coma and two steps away from death… true story. I never realized it at the time and when I found out it certainly put things in perspective but that will come up in a following blog.

　
This information was taken from, Alcoholics anonymous website.
The book by; Robert, L. Dupont and Betty Ford. The Selfish Brain: Learning from addiction.
Harvard Medical School website.